Tiny particles of plastic, shards of commonplace objects, had previously been discovered in sea ice and water – and even in human blood – but never in freshly fallen snow.
According to new research, the purity of freshly fallen snow in Antarctica cannot be taken for granted. Microplastics were discovered in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica.
Tiny particles of plastic, shards of commonplace objects, had previously been discovered in sea ice and water – and even in human blood – but never in freshly fallen snow.
The study, which was published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere, demonstrates “the global scope of plastic contamination” by discovering an average of 29 microplastic particles per liter of melted snow.
The concentration was even greater than that of the neighboring Ross Sea and Antarctic sea ice.
Snow samples collected near Antarctica’s scientific outposts revealed concentrations nearly three times higher than those reported in Italian glacier debris.
More than a dozen distinct forms of plastic were discovered, with PET, which is used to produce beverage bottles, being the most prevalent.
Late in 2019, Alex Aves, a doctoral candidate at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, gathered samples from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
According to Dr. Laura Revell, at the time, her colleagues were “optimistic that she would not detect any microplastics in such a clean and distant site.”
Dr. Revell said that Ms. Aves was also instructed to collect snow from Scott Base and McMurdo Station streets to analyse microplastics.
But they needn’t have bothered: “Once back in the lab, it became immediately apparent that there were plastic particles in every sample from the remote places on the Ross Ice Shelf as well, and that the findings were of worldwide relevance.”
Ms. Aves expressed alarm at the discoveries “The discovery of microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow demonstrates the pervasiveness of plastic pollution in even the most distant locations.
“We collected snow samples from 19 locations across the Ross Island region of Antarctica and discovered microplastics in each.
“In retrospect, I’m not surprised at all,” Dr. Revell remarked. Studies published in the previous few years have taught us that whenever we look for microplastics in the air, we find them.
